[Klaustrophobia]

And maybe AoA too, I haven't played that one in long enough to remember.  My question is, does WiH somehow override the lighting settings of the launcher?  The reason I ask is I've been farting around with different values trying to make it look better (to me), but I don't notice any difference at all.  I've even set the values absurdly high and low just to make sure it wasn't just a really subtle change.  If they are overridden, can I turn that off?  I understand the mod is going for dark and moody and all, but I'd really rather be able to see where the hell I'm going.  And not burn my retinas whenever the sun swings into view or any torpedo anywhere detonates (I think this one should be affected by -bloom_intensity?).

[General Battuta]

I don't think it should have any ability to override lighting settings in the launcher, and I've definitely been able to alter the look extensively by screwing around with ambient-intensity.

e: or ambient factor or whatever it's called

[Klaustrophobia]

I tried the default (no flags), the "recommended settings" from the wiki, and then jacking it as high as 150 and as low as 10.  Everything still is as dark as ever.  The non-sun facing sides of ships are just plain black unless there are glowing bits.  It's what I would imagine "no emissive light" is supposed to look like, though I've never actually enabled that.  Do you remember around what values you've used that you noticed differences on?  Also, common sense would suggest that higher values = brighter, but something I read somewhere in the wiki made it sound like it might be the other way around.

[MatthTheGeek]

Put ambient to 200. That's the max, and that's how I took screenshots like this.

[Fury]

Lighting in WiH is different from vanilla FS2 and most other mods because HerraTohtori made sure that lighting in Sol is somewhat realistic. Amount of ambient light in missions depends on distance to the Sun as well as other planetary bodies. This is why launcher settings have reduced effect in WiH missions compared to other mods, even AoA.

[Klaustrophobia]

Thanks, I'll give 200 a go.  Anyone got any other thoughts on toning down the screen whiteout?

[Fury]

Edit cfg files in blueplanet2\data\config.

[Crybertrance]

Edit cfg files in blueplanet2\data\config.

Umm, there is no config folder in data, nor are there any cfg files.

e:- Found them in the core vp

e2:- @Fury, yup, I completely forgot about that!

[Fury]

The cfg files are in the core vp file obviously. Modding 101.

[Luis Dias]

What do people mean when they say the lighting is "realistic" taking consideration the distance to the sun and etc.?

I ask this very seriously (and curiously). Do you mean to say that ambience is zero when there is no planet nearby, and non-zero when there is one? I am pretty satisfied with that decision.

Do you mean to say that in missions where the sun is distant, then the lighting should be very very small? That's pretty unjustified to me. The reason being because our eyes are so adaptive you cannot really compare a situation near Earth to a situation far away directly. Because the screen is limited to 24 bits (and I'm sure the calculations of lighting are also constrained to 24 bits, correct me if I am wrong), the adaptiveness of our eyes is lost on both the lack of contrast and the amount of calculations per pixel (which degrade the image to a very far below 24 bits "quality" in the end).

A much more compelling differentiator would be a very wide range of contrasting colors near Earth (or the Sun for that matter) and when you want to convey darkness, instead of going "full dark" which is somewhat annoying, you can go "near-full black and white" with post-processing or something of the sort. The idea here is to convey that the eyes have indeed adapted to the darkness of the sky (with the sun far away), but at the cost of color perception (which is what realistically happens to our sight when the ambient is very dark).

Or perhaps BP already does some of this, and I'm going overboard here. But I agree that the darkness of BP is sometimes off-putting.

[headdie]

I think you fail to comprehend how little light there is, we can see planets from the reflected light of the sun because space is black, total absence of light.  also you fail to consider that while the human eye can adjust to varying light levels, the range is fairly small, just look at many animals such as owls and cats which can see much better than us so yes it is fair to expect things to look dim at long ranges from the sun

[Luis Dias]

And you just fail to understand how incredible our eyes are. In a completely dimmed empty space, our eyes are able to distinguish a light candle 40 kms away. The fact that there are animals with more incredible eyes than ours is irrelevant. If space is homogeneously dim, then we can see extremely well.

[General Battuta]

What do people mean when they say the lighting is "realistic" taking consideration the distance to the sun and etc.?

I ask this very seriously (and curiously). Do you mean to say that ambience is zero when there is no planet nearby, and non-zero when there is one? I am pretty satisfied with that decision.

Do you mean to say that in missions where the sun is distant, then the lighting should be very very small? That's pretty unjustified to me. The reason being because our eyes are so adaptive you cannot really compare a situation near Earth to a situation far away directly. Because the screen is limited to 24 bits (and I'm sure the calculations of lighting are also constrained to 24 bits, correct me if I am wrong), the adaptiveness of our eyes is lost on both the lack of contrast and the amount of calculations per pixel (which degrade the image to a very far below 24 bits "quality" in the end).

It's not really any of these. By default there is little/no ambient light at all in BP2 missions. Instead, all light comes from the sun and nearby planetary bodies. The amount of light in a given mission isn't, I believe, absolutely realistically; it's just proportionally realistic.

I do like the dynamic range idea! Only doable with PP though.

[Klaustrophobia]

Given enough time, the human eye can adjust for pretty extreme levels of darkness.  This is why I put up blackout curtains in my bedroom and taped over power LEDs on stuff I can't turn off.  However, as long as were going ultra-deep into this, even a miniscule amount of glow from the HUD/controls in the cockpit would wreck the pilot's natural "night vision" against a deep-space black.

I bumped the 'intensity' on all the torpedos I could see in that .cfg from .6 to .5.  I can't specifically recall what the flashes looked like after that, which to me means mission accomplished since I wasn't reaching for my sunglasses.  200 for the ambient factor worked very well in the deep-space missions, but then I hit the Luna one and hurt my eyes again.  The surface was just a bright white glow .  I'll tweak around and see if I can find a nice balance. 

Hey, thought just hit me.  Is it possible to specify custom launcher flags like lighting on a per-mod basis with a config file or something?  I imagine cranking up the lights for WiH will result in way over-brightness in retail/other mods.

[niffiwan]

Hey, thought just hit me.  Is it possible to specify custom launcher flags like lighting on a per-mod basis with a config file or something?  I imagine cranking up the lights for WiH will result in way over-brightness in retail/other mods.

I believe wxLauncher does this already, with its profiles